1991 Awards for Scholarly Distinction
In 1984 the Council of the AHA established an award entitled the American Historical As sociation Award for Scholarly Distinction. Each year the Nominating Committee recommends to the Council up to three names for the award, and the Council then selects up to three names from the list presented. Nominees are senior historians of the highest distinction in the historical profession who have spent the bulk of their professional careers in the United States. Previous awards have gone to Nettie Lee Benson, Woodrow Borah, Angie Debo, Helen G. Edmonds, Felix Gilbert, John W. Hall, Margaret Atwood Judson, Paul Oskar Kristeller, Edmund Morgan, Benjamin Quarles, Edwin 0. Reischauer, Caroline Robbins, Kenneth M. Setton, Kenneth M. Stampp, and Sylvia L. Thrupp Strayer. Joining this distinguished list are Gerhart Burian Ladner, Chester G. Storr, and Merze Tate. The following citations were read by President-elect Wakeman at the General Meeting:
In a career spanning sixty years, Gerhart B. Ladner has shown a broader versatility and, in works of the highest erudition and originality, a more imposing productivity than any medieval historian now practicing in North America. He achieved all this despite three great interruptions: emigration to Canada, service in World War II, and emigration to the United States. Here, he has taught in four history departments (Notre Dame, Howard, Fordham, and UCLA), deeply influenced not only his graduate students but also his institutional and international colleagues, and gained various honors—to mention only two: the presidencies of the Medieval Academy of America and the American Catholic Historical Association. European and American medievalists have enthusiastically recognized his scholarly preeminence. His friends and closest colleagues, moreover, know him as a cosmopolitan intellectual, a mind of virtually un limited interests, and a person with a powerful sense of social responsibility.
After earning his doctorate in medieval art history, Ladner qualified-also at Vienna-in the austere science of diplomatics. Correspondingly he devoted his first two bock-length studies to eleventh-century Italian painting and to the thirteenth-century imperial chancery. Since 1931, however, his publications have ranged widely: in 1936, Ladner presented a monograph on the relations between theology and politics in the tenth and eleventh centuries. In a five-volume study (1941–1984), he surveyed contemporary portraits of popes from antiquity to the Renaissance. The Idea of Reform (Cambridge, MA, 1959) has remained a model for historians of ecclesiastical and religious thought. Though most of his writings concern the period from late antiquity to the Renaissance, he has written on modern Austrian political and intellectual his tory, as well as on the state of, and prospects for, medieval studies. His collected articles, Images and Ideas (2 vols. Rome 1983), incorporate thirty-nine essays, one new and some others in revised form; in addition to his book-length studies, it has become an indispensable repository of fundamental research.
Certain themes recur in Ladner’s writings as reflections of his principal concerns: art works as vehicles of ideas, the interactions of theology and politics in various centuries, relations between Church and monarchy, symbolism in arts and texts, ideas of reform and renewal, the religious use of images (the Iconoclastic Controversy in East and West)—this list gives only a general impression of his range. He has a bold readiness to treat philosophical aspects of historical interpretation, and equally to touch on the largest themes, for instance, as in a long article on “Greatness in the Middle Ages.” In particular, one of his essays—”Homo viator: Mediaeval Ideas on Alienation and Order”—addresses the modern condition as well as the medieval experience in a way that nonmedieval historians and laypersons as well as medievalists must find deeply moving. In these last two essays and elsewhere, Ladner interprets medieval notions of humanity, of human nature, as well as of a social or cosmic order, permeated, vivified, and held together by medieval religious convictions. But these studies are never airy exercises in abstract ideas, rather they concentrate on the most challenging figures, like St. Francis and the leading popes and monarchs.
Today, Ladner’s productivity and innovative energy continue unabated: the first volume of a two-volume study on ancient and medieval symbolism is now in press, and he plans to return soon to exploring, in two further volumes, the idea of reform till the end of the Middle Ages.
Chester G. Starr is both an active historian and a philosopher of history who has put a distinctive stamp on a generation of work on ancient Greco-Roman history. Although he has always been reticent about claiming that his work is in formed by an overarching philosophy, a core idea—that the study of history can teach profound lessons about what it is to live human lives in complex societies—pervades all of his work. It is especially clear in his two books that focused on historiography: The Awakening of the Greek Historical Spirit (1968) and The Flawed Mirror (1983). The latter is a thoughtful assessment of history as “a mirror which men hold up to gain light on how they have come to be as they are.” He never forgets that historians are inevitably influenced by the intellectual and social currents of their own times or that their work will be ignored if it cannot address issues of contemporary concern.
Among Starr’s methodological advances, two stand out: in a series of source-critical articles (notably “The Myth of the Minoan Thalassocracy” [1955] and “The Credibility of Early Spartan History” [1965]), he demonstrated definitively the methodological error of searching for a “germ of truth” in late accounts of pre-classical history. This insight paved the way for his second major advance: the full integration of archaeological and art historical material into the writing of cultural and social history: The Origins of Greek Civilization (1961) was an epoch-making book, in part because of its reliance on a sensitive reading of the pottery record. Today, and to a large degree because of Starr’s seminal work. there is general recognition among ancient historians that every study must have a grounding in archaeological theory and practice, and that “mute evidence” must be considered alongside texts.
In light of his remarkable record of publication, one might suppose that Starr would have had little time to devote to teaching. Not so—he had a stellar record as a teacher of both undergraduates and graduates. His undergraduate courses at Michigan were heavily subscribed, and he continued to teach at all levels (including a popular survey of Greek history) until his retirement. His commitment to undergraduate teaching is also displayed in his writing: most notably in his magisterial textbook A History of the Ancient World (currently in a third edition), but also in the many books that he wrote throughout his career with an eye to the intelligent under graduate. The fact that most of his books are still in print is a tribute both to the enduring value of his work and to his willingness to write in an idiom that can be appreciated by specialist and student alike. As a graduate teacher, Starr never attempted to impose on his students a standard methodology or demanded that they work on some area close to his research. And yet he was always available to students as a gentle guide and a sympathetic and careful reader of outlines, chapters, and article drafts. Moreover, he taught his students not only how to be scholars but how to teach-he helped graduate students think through issues of grading, lecture style, and content, stimulating and guiding student discussion.
In the course of his long career he defined a distinctively American style in the practice of writing and teaching ancient history. He was a Founding President of the Association of Ancient Historians, which has thrived since its early origins in the early 1970s. While at the University of Illinois, he developed his own distinctive, and influential, approach to training students. At least in part because of his independent approach to the field, American ancient history has found its own voice in the three decades of his unquestioned eminence.
Merze Tate is best known for her books on the history of disarmament and on the United States’ annexation of Hawaii. Born in Blanchard, Michigan, she was educated at Columbia and Oxford universities where she was the first African American woman to receive an advanced research degree. She received the PhD in 1941 from Radcliffe College. She began her career at Barber College where she served as Dean of Women and at Bennett College where she served as Chair of Social Sciences. From 1941 to 1942, she taught at Morgan State College in Maryland before moving to Howard University in1942, where she taught until her retirement in 1977.
She pursued research in diplomatic history in Great Britain, Hawaii, Fiji, New Zealand, Australia, France, West Germany, and Africa as well as in the United States. Major works include The Disarmament Illusion: The Movement for Limitation of Armaments to 1907 (1942), Hawaii: Reciprocity or Annexation? (1968), The United States and Armaments (1969), and The United States and the Kingdom of Hawaii: A Political History (1965). The latter is still considered the most comprehensive account of the way the Hawaiian kingdom, due no less to its own internal weakness than to American ambitions, lost its independence. During the 1970s and 1980s, she became interested in United States relations with black Africa, reflecting the same concern with enriching our understanding of the past through the study of topics and themes lying outside the usually presented “main currents.” The field of diplomatic history has made significant strides since the 1930s, and its thematic broadening as well as conceptual redefining are due to the works of pioneering scholars, among whom Merze Tate was one of the earliest.
Honorary Foreign Member
At the AHA’s second annual meeting in Saratoga in 1885, the newly appointed Committee on Nominations for Honorary Membership introduced a resolution, which was adopted, that appointed Leopold von Ranke as the first honorary foreign member. In the intervening 105 years, only seventy-five individuals have been so honored. Previously selected biennially, selection is now made annually honoring a foreign scholar who is distinguished in his or her field and who has “notably aided the work of American historians.”
President-elect Wakeman announced the addition of Luis de Albuquerque to the list of twenty-one living honorary members.
Luis de Albuquerque is one of the most distinguished Portuguese historians of his time. Bornin1917 in Lisbon, he has since his first publication in 1941 published over 750 works, including books, articles, reviews, and essays. Active as a research scholar, author, and editor, he has also offered indispensable reference and advice for historians in the fields of discovery history, the mathematics of nautical science as well as of instrumentation of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and the history of cartography of the Portuguese colonial world, from Labrador to the La Plata, and from the Red Sea to Macao and Japan. He has taught at the University of Coimbra, where he has also served terms as director of the science faculty, vice director of the university, and director of the library. He has been very active in arranging and directing inter national conferences and symposia in Brazil, Spain, Italy, North Korea, and the United States. Over the past several decades, American scholars have been recipients of the extraordinary generosity of Luis de Albuquerque and the Association is pleased that he is the first Portuguese named as an honorary foreign member.
Eugene Asher Distinguished Teaching Award
While the AHA has traditionally recognized outstanding scholarship, for over a hundred years there was no prize honoring teaching. In 1986 the AHA’s Teaching Division recommended and the Council approved the establishment of an annual award to recognize both excellence in teaching and knowledge of the subject of history. The award is given jointly by the AHA and the Society for History Education (SHE) and is named for the late Eugene Asher, former executive secretary of SHE and for decades a central figure in efforts to improve the quality of history teaching. The Teaching Division oversees the selection of the recipient of the award; nominations are submitted by the previous year’s book prize winners. Each is invited to nominate one of his or her teachers, who, by inspirational impact and excellence, encouraged that individual to study history. Eligible for consideration are school, under graduate, and graduate instructors.
Jackson H. Bailey, professor of history at Earlham College, was awarded the 1991 Asher Award at the AHA’s General Meeting in Chicago. Dr. Bailey was nominated by Robert Borgen, University of California, Davis, recipient of the 1990 Breasted Prize. Dr. Borgen read portions of his nomination letter at the Presentation Ceremony.
“For the Asher Distinguished Teacher Award, I wish to nominate Jackson Bailey, Professor of History at Earlham College, a man who has devoted his adult life to teaching and helped mold both my vocation and avocation.
“As I recall, it was the summer between the fourth and fifth grades that I spent at a remarkable camp in Vermont. Its staff was international, and its clientele racially diverse: the son of Tuskegee Institute’s president was a cabinmate….
“Some years later, as a freshman at Antioch College, I signed up for a course entitled The Far East in World Affairs. It was to be taught by a professor from Earlham, who drove to Antioch twice a week for his lectures. Although it was an upper division course, I was able to talk my way into it because I had studied some Asian history in high school and was hoping to participate in what was then an Antioch-Earlham study-abroad program in Japan. The professor, Jack Bailey, looked vaguely familiar, and eventually I realized that my new professor was my former camp craft counsellor….
“Although the course focused on modern Asia, Jack assumed that for most of us it would probably be our only occasion to study Asia seriously, so he allowed us considerable latitude in selecting topics for the required two book reviews and single term paper. Since my interests already leaned toward earlier periods of history and to their literature, my first book review was of the classic Japanese court romance, The Tale of Genji. My own book, Sugawara no Michizana and the Early Heian Court, was meant in part to offer a historically accurate picture of the culture that produced The Tale of Genji, a book that I now teach annually. For my second review, I read Edwin Reischauer’s Ennin’s Travels in T’ang China, an account of early ninth-century Sino-Japanese relations based on the diary of a Japanese Buddhist monk who traveled widely in China in 838–847…. My current research brings me directly to two projects I worked on as a freshman. This is not simply a coincidence. To Jack’s credit, he encouraged us to explore unfamiliar areas rather than objecting to a naive freshman’s plan to work on early history and literature as part of a course on modem East Asia. That was typical. I have been in contact with only a few of Jack’s former students: two are art historians, one a sociologist, one a psychiatrist, and another an architect. My own work is interdisciplinary, in history and literature.
“What all of Jack’s former students share is a continuing interest in Asia, in particular Japan. His principal goal was to bring Japanese studies into the mainstream of undergraduate education, and he pursued that objective with missionary zeal. At Antioch, he did not simply teach a single course, he also helped the school hire its own Asian historian, a China specialist who became my undergraduate advisor. In the mid-sixties, he established one of the earliest American under graduate study-in-Japan programs that started out as an Antioch-Earlham endeavor but is now run by a consortium of twenty-five midwestern liberal arts colleges. He also created a program for young Americans to teach English in rural Japan for a year or two after they graduate from college….
“Although small liberal arts colleges have been the principal focus of Jack’s activities, he has also looked beyond them. Most conspicuously, he produced a series of television programs intended to introduce Japanese culture, traditional and modem, to a wider audience. Available in videotape, they are widely used in schools, and I believe have been broadcast on educational television stations. Also, the Indiana Department of Education asked him to help introduce material on Japan to public school curricula, and this led to his establishing the Earlham Institute for Education on Japan. Through this institute, he has become involved in programs for business leaders too.
“Despite Jack’s extensive commitments to teaching, he has published useful works. He has edited a set of Occasional Papers published by Earlham. Included is a paper he wrote: ‘Japan on the World Scene: Reflection on Uniqueness and Commonality.’ Previously, he edited a book, Listening to Japan: A Japanese Anthology, consisting of English translations of works by Japanese specialists His most important research contribution will surely prove to be his book that is now in press at the University of Hawaii.
“I doubt that any historian has worked as hard or as effectively as he to bring Asia into the undergraduate curriculum. He started on this long before ‘multicultural education’ became fashionable. Jackson Bailey is a fine historian whose career has been dedicated to teaching.”
Margaret Strobel, University of Illinois at Chicago and Acting Chair of the Teaching Division, announced awards for honorable mention for 1991: Albert Bender, Wheeling College; Sidney D. Brown, Oklahoma State University; F. L. Loewenheim, Rice University; Norbert Mc Donald, University of British Columbia; Chester G. Starr, University of Michigan; Clarence L. Ver Steeg, Northwestern University, and John Witek, S.J., Georgetown University.
Testimonial: Donald B. Hoffman, Phi Alpha Theta
On behalf of the Association’s Council, Dr. Wakeman read the following citation: ‘The American Historical Association is enormously pleased to recognize Donald B. Hoffman for an exceptional career of service to the historical profession. Under his leadership, Phi Alpha Theta, the International Honor Society of History now celebrating its seventieth anniversary, has achieved a worldwide reputation for promoting and recognizing academic excellence among students of history. In observing this three-score years and ten anniversary, it is proper that we give credit where credit is due. Donald Hoffman has completed no less than sixty years of service on the Board of Directors of Phi Alpha Theta and fifty years as its international Secretary-Treasurer. Although he was not present at the creation of Phi Alpha Theta, he has overseen its growth from only 11 to 715 chapters and the initiation of 180,000 members into the society—a truly impressive record and a tribute to Don’s tireless work on behalf of the society and of the discipline of history. We are proud as well to count him among our most loyal members-just last year Don passed the fifty-year mark in his membership in the Association.
“The Council of the Association takes great pleasure in honoring Donald Hoffman for six decades of invaluable service and unfailing devotion to Phi Alpha Theta and to the historical profession.”
1991 Book Awards
At the annual meeting in Chicago, the following prizes were announced for the year 1991. The committees’ citations are recorded below:
Herbert Baxter Adams Prize
Theodore Kodltschek, University of Missouri-Columbia, for Class Formation and Urban-Industrial Society: Bradford, 1750–1850, Cambridge University Press (1990). Theodore Koditschek examines the transformation of Bradford’s social structure: how preindustrial social groups became classes, and how political ideology, religious beliefs, and culture were changed by industrialization and urbanization. His research taps a vast and diverse array of sources, from Home Office records to family correspondence and fiction. The work is theoretically sophisticated, moving beyond Marxian and Thompsonian paradigms to locate the abstraction of “class” in a concrete historical setting and emphasize the agency of bourgeois capitalists in the way the working class was made.
George Louis Beer Prize
John Gillingham, University of Missouri-St. Louis, for Coal, Steel, and the Rebirth of Europe, 1945–1955, Cambridge University Press (1991). Widely researched in the archives of several nations of Europe and North America, John Gillingham’s Coal, Steel and the Rebirth of Europe, 1945–1955 places the formation of the European Coal and Steel Community in a fresh long-term perspective, rooting it in interwar corporatist and cartelist experiments. The 1991 committee wishes to recognize by this award to John Gillingham a work whose meticulous research and provocative and stimulating conclusions will long be of value to historians of mid-twentieth century Europe.
Albert J. Beveridge Award
Richard Price, Martinique, for Alabi’s World, John Hopkins University Press (1990). A brilliant study of the career of an important maroon leader in Surinam, Alabi’ s World is a significant contribution to the history of slavery and resistance in the New World. Blending anthropology and history, it is also a methodologically innovative work, which can serve as a model for both historically minded anthropologists and ethnographically inclined social historians.
John H. Dunning Prize
Eric Arnesen, Harvard University, for Waterfront Workers of New Orleans: Race, Class, and Politics 1863–1923, Oxford University Press (1991). Eric Arnesen’s book is local history at its best, drawing it into the broader context of regional and national processes. Arnesen’s superbly written book studies the social, economic, and political milieu of the important New Orleans waterfront during a time of transformation. Incorporating a wide range of primary and secondary sources, the author successfully explains how Caucasian and African-American workers defined themselves in forging a biracial labor alliance on behalf of improved working conditions despite an unfavorable economy.
John K. Fairbank Prize
Andrew Gordon, Duke University, for Labor and Imperial Democracy in Prewar Japan, University of California Press (1991). The committee believes Labor and Imperial Democracy to be a truly important effort at reopening the debate on democracy and fascism in prewar Japan. This is a book in labor history, finely written, thoroughly researched, and cogently argued, but it is also a major contribution to our understanding of the failure of Japanese democracy. By integrating the reactions of Japan’s establishment toward labor activism, Gordon persuasively creates a larger framework of explanation for the twists and turns of Japanese politics.
Herbert Feis Award
Burnett Bolloten, for The Spanish Civil War: Revolution and Counterrevolution, 1936–1939, University of North Carolina Press (1991). Burnett Bolloten’s The Spanish Civil War is the culmination of a lifetime of devoted research and writing on the Spanish Civil War. The book’s scope and its attention to documentary detail make it indispensable to anyone desiring to understand the war itself and how the Spanish Civil War reflected major themes of war and peace in the twentieth century.
Leo Gershoy Award
Helen Nader, Indiana University, for Liberty in Absolutist Spain: The Hapsburg Sale of Towns, 1516–1700, Johns Hopkins University Press (1990). Helen Nader studies in Castile the political connections between towns on the one hand and seigneurial lords and monarchical government on the other, tracing the Hapsburg transformation of villages into towns and consequent sale of towns to the nobility. Joining national with regional history, she shows how the Hapsburg regime paradoxically drew financial power to the center but at the same time decentralized political power at the periphery.
Clarence Haring Prize
Alberto Flores Galindo, Universidad Catolica del Peru, for Buscando un inca: Identidad y utopia en los Andes, Instituto de Apoyo Agrario (1987). Composed of a series of nine es says on the struggle for collective identity and social justice over five hundred years of Peruvian history, Buscando un inca explores the repeated appeal of utopian visions of preconquest society to the cultural, social, and psychological victims of colonialism and capitalist modernization. Focusing on concrete actors, events, and controversies that range from colonial rebellions to the novels of twentieth-century intellectuals, the book builds a compelling case that the millennial dreams and apocalyptic expectations associated with these utopian visions were not the exclusive (and “exotic”) province of Indians. As in versions of a deeply flawed social order, they appealed at different times to all sectors of Peruvian society, to Indians, mestizos and creoles, to agrarians and urbanites, to popular classes as well as members of the elite. Buttressed by native religion and folk Catholicism—and in the twentieth century by Marxian thought as well—such dreams and visions give rise to complex, fragile political alliances that cut across class and ethnic boundaries. One such alliance is the contemporary insurgent movement known as the Shining Path.
This, then, is a volume that crackles with ideas about the ways in which the Andean past and its present have been constructed. But it does more than insert the grave contemporary crisis of Peruvian society into the long sweep of Andean social and cultural history. Flores Galindo’s reading of the past seeks to construct a practical, democratic politic for the future able to transcend both myths about the authoritarian, egalitarian preconquest utopia and the abject realities of the contemporary Western capitalist order.
Based on a lifetime of research on the social and intellectual history of Peru, this provocative (even polemical) book is nonetheless a generous one that encapsulates and reflects the richness of Andean historiography and charts exciting new directions for research. Informed by social theory and innovative methods of cultural criticism, it is at the same time true to the critical methods of historians and accessible to abroad reading public.
Flores Galindo did not live to see the society he hoped to help construct. But the legacy of his humane scholarship will surely influence the thought of the generations to come.
Joan Kelly Memorial Prize
Susan A. Glenn, University of Texas, Austin, for Daughters of the Shtetl: Life and Labor in the Immigrant Generation, Cornell University Press (1990). It a rich and eloquent analysis, Glenn traces the immigration experience of young Jewish garment workers. Her account begins in the small towns of Russia and Poland at the turn of the twentieth century and ends in the textile cities of New York and Chicago. In the best tradition of women’s history, Glenn not only brings young garment workers alive for the reader, she challenges us to think anew about the past. Examining women’s experiences on both sides of the Atlantic, she breaks down the European-American boundary that often divides migration history, and she rethinks the relationships among gender, work, and ethnicity in determining aspirations and actions.
Waldo G. Leland Prize
Israel Gutman, editor in chief, Encyclopedia of the Holocaust, Macmillan Publishing Company (1990). This award is given in recognition of the work of compiling recent material, much of which appears here in print for the first time, organized in a clear and orderly fashion for the use of researchers and the generally curious public on a topic of significant importance for an understanding of twentieth-century history.
Littleton-Griswold Prize
Laura Kalman, University of California-Santa Barbara, for Abe Fortas, Yale University Press (1990). In its description of Laura Kalman’s Abe Fortas, Yale University Press wrote: “Reflecting on the various aspects of Fortas’s enigmatic personality and the events of his life, Kalman creates a new portrait of the man that is more insightful and complete than any yet published. Engagingly written and superbly researched, this is the authoritative account of Fortas and the legal and political history he helped to shape.” The Littleton-Griswold Prize Committee agrees. In its original treatment of American liberalism from the 1930s through the 1960s, Kalman’s Fortas makes a contribution to the history of American law and society worthy of the prize.
Howard R. Marraro Prize
Antonio Calabria, University of Texas-San Antonio, for The Cost of Empire: The Finances of the Kingdom of Naples in the Time of Spanish Rule, Cambridge University Press (1991). This impressively researched and argued book addresses important questions of state-building, and illuminates the beginnings of the North-South dichotomy in Italian society. The book is outstanding in linking Naples’ fate to the Spanish Empire, with its imperial determination to fund military adventures regard less of local consequences.
Robert Livingston Schuyler Prize
Theodore Koditschek, University of Missouri-Columbia, for Class Formation and Urban Industrial Society: Bradford, 1750–1850, Cambridge University Press (1990). With conceptual clarity, mastery of the historical literature innumerous fields, and wide-ranging and sophisticated original research, Theodore Koditschek has expanded our understanding of the dynamics of class formation, class conflict, and emerging consensus in nineteenth-century England. This broad study demonstrates how economics, religion, politics, and ideology interacted and differentially affected individuals and classes in the new liberal industrial society. This book was chosen from a field of seventy-eight works published during the past five years on the domestic and imperial history of Great Britain in all eras. Many of these books were, in the view of the committee, excellent contributions to the field, a judgment that adds even greater distinction to Koditschek’s study.
By committee decision, the James Henry Breasted Prize for pre-1000 A.O. African, North American, and Latin American history was not awarded in 1991.
